Matthews put his pen down. He didn't care what people said about the
pen being mightier than the sword. If he was going to kill those damned
peasants, he wanted to be armed with something fiercer than a biro. He
wanted a crossbow, or an air-rifle or even just a small axe. Something
made of metal would be nice.

He couldn't sleep. It felt like he hadn't slept for days. He sweated
and moved and wriggled on the bed, but couldn't let go. He switched on
the light and got out his notepad. His scribbled notes looked like the
jottings of a madman. He knew he wasn't making much sense nowadays. He
was confusing himself, so God only knew what other people thought of him.
He seemed to be living in a parallel universe to other people; his conversations
were limited to ordering food at the Chinese takeaway and buying cigarettes
from the cornershop.

He knew he was lonely, because he had tried having conversations with
random strangers: people at bus-stops, girls who looked like they might
be in need of directions. Everyone smiled politely but made it abundantly
clear that they didn't want to talk to him.

If he wanted things to improve he would have to kill the peasants. They
were stealing his grouse, harvesting his crops, talking about him behind
his back in their thick, yokel voices. It was his flat; he was buggered
if he was going to feel like a prisoner in his own home.

The youngest peasant was probably not even in his teens. He had a
mop of blonde, Aryan hair and a cheeky grin that grandmothers loved and
everyone else feared.

The women were worse, gap-toothed fishwives who played pop music at all
hours. He would shiver at the thought of it: Lionel Ritchie, Take That,
Whitney Houston...these bands weren't even popular anymore. If she had
been blaring out garage or hip hop, he could at least consider it educational,
but these were songs he had spent his adult life avoiding.

He needed sleep. Uninterrupted sleep. A sleep free from dreams or
alarm clock, free from the outside world. He had started buying copies
of gun magazines at the newsagent. He knew he was sinking into caricature,
but couldn't help himself. He had given up on his writing, his painting...
what good was art when faced with the Greatest Hits of Eternal?

"I am going to do something. I am going to change the world,"
he said to himself. He had to be satisfied with his pen. Maybe he could
stab a few of them with his ball-point before the police arrived.

He gripped the biro and unlocked his door. He took a
deep breath and approached the peasants' door.

*****

The police found him asleep on the neighbour's kitchen table.
The neighbours had left the door unlocked, and had come home from the pub
and found him there. They couldn't wake him. It took four policemen to carry
him to the station.